They are packing up from North Hollywood to Calabasas to fly to Paris, Rome, Hong Kong and Vienna, and other beautiful and historic cities of the world.

We packed up and headed to, well, Fresno.

Actually we just stayed overnight there. Our real destination was Sacramento, or Northern Fresno, just a hop and a lurch from Stockton, where many Fresnoians spend their vacations.

Knowing there are those living the sweet life in 5-star cities while I spent the night in a no-star motel is almost more than I can take.

It’s not that Fresno is filled with crime and disease exactly or that it is particularly evil. It’s just sort of what Gertrude Stein was said to have remarked about Oakland, my hometown, that there isn’t any there there.

In artistic terms, Fresno would be colored gray with maybe some browns and a flash of pale green in the better parts of town, which I assume they have, although I never actually saw any.

I can, however, understand why people who live there prefer it to Los Angeles, which they consider a secular representation of Hell. While they do have freeways around Fresno, they have nothing like the jammed, inadequate freeway entanglements that characterize our main systems of transportation.

“If there is ever a need to evacuate the city,” my wife, the wise Cinelli, said just the other day, “I’m not even going to try getting on a freeway trapped to die between a semi and an RV at a complete standstill. I’d rather die in my garden than on the 405.”

We spent overnight in Fresno at a motel where I would never stay again and now we are in a motel in Sacramento where, it is said, certain short-term misdemeanor criminals are sent to do their time. I don’t have room enough here to go into the pathetic details of my displeasures, but imagine living in a rabbit pen in the Mojave Desert.

When I had a regular job and was still writing books and TV movies, we could afford going to the exotic cities of the world, but now that I’m doing part-time stuff it’s pretty much either Fresno and Northern Fresno or nowhere at all.

We are in the latter town checking on property we own, hoping for the day a booming economy will re-emerge and we can sell what we have and upgrade our vacation destinations to places like Cudahy or Santee. Ah, for the good life again.

Al Martinez writes a column on Mondays. He can be reached at almtz13@aol.com.

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